Secret NYPD Document Teaches Cops To Illegally Raid Sealed Records
Police are running roughshod over a half-century-old law preventing access to the sealed arrest records of 3.5 million people.
Nick Pinto
July 21 2021, 8:00 a.m.
THE NEW YORK Police Department has been training its officers to break a long-standing law that bars police from snooping in the sealed arrest records of millions of innocent people, according to court papers filed in a lawsuit last week.
The news comes in a class-action lawsuit concerning the police department’s practice of flouting a state law designed to protect people from discrimination, harassment, and further legal consequences over old arrests that didn’t result in a conviction. The Bronx Defenders, a public defense organization, brought the legal action against New York City and the NYPD.
Defense lawyers in New York say they regularly find NYPD printouts of their clients’ old sealed arrests in prosecutors’ paperwork, and police sources often leak the sealed arrest histories of people killed by police and political enemies to the media. The leak of Eric Garner’s sealed arrest history after he was killed by police in 2014, for example, is now the subject of a judicial inquiry.
The flouting of the records law results in the perpetuation of a racist regime of harassment in which bad arrests lead to more bad arrests, a “garbage-in, garbage-out” cycle, said Niji Jain, a lawyer with the Bronx Defenders’ impact litigation practice and one of the attorneys on the case.
https://theintercept.com/2021/07/21/nypd-secret-training-sealed-arrest-records/
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